White Paper on Medical Financing (PDF; 109 KB)
Source: American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, Inc.

There has been no free market in American medicine for some 60 years. Voluntary, mutually advantageous exchanges between buyers and sellers have been impaired by government intervention. The patient-doctor relationship has been eroded or superseded by third-party contracts, as true insurance has been turned into prepayment schemes.

The drive for “reform” to accomplish “universal coverage” through subsidies and coercion will only exacerbate current problems, including cost inflation with diminishing quality and access. A proper understanding of rights and responsibilities is essential in formulating policy that will free medicine and defeat efforts to impose top-down, centrally planned command-and-control medicine on all Americans. Government—with the distortions it has imposed on the medical and the insurance market—is the problem, not the solution.

Preserving the right of patients to self-insure and to privately contract for medical services is critical. Discrimination against self-paying patients is a serious problem: Antitrust provisions and protections modeled on right-to-work laws could help to counteract this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 26th, 2006 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Health and healthcare, Health insurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.